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‘Letters: Bykofsky’s ideas skate on thin ICE’ via Philly.com

On Friday, July 18, 2014, Daily News Columnist Stu Bykofsky wrote an article entitled ‘Welcome, foreign felons.’ The following Letter to the Editor is in response to that article:

NO ONE should be held in jail for days on end because some federal agent wants to “run checks” on them to see whether it would be lawful to arrest them for something. In fact, the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments to our Constitution prohibit that kind of tyrannical police-state behavior.

Yet, Stu Bykofsky, in his column “Welcome, foreign felons,” takes Mayor Nutter to task for upholding this basic American principle. The city has a policy, in place since mid-April, of refusing to honor non-binding “detainer” requests lodged by federal immigration authorities on prisoners in city jails whom our criminal justice system has determined should be released. In the court case – won by the ACLU – that determined that these ICE “detainers” are legally unenforceable, the plaintiff was a U.S. citizen, born in New Jersey, whom Allentown police wrongly suspected of being an undocumented noncitizen. As a result, he spent over three extra days in jail, despite having already made bail, while ICE got around to figuring out the police were wrong. (As it turned out, he was mistakenly in jail in the first place; when his trial came up, he was acquitted of the charge for which he had been arrested.)

Philadelphia’s policy avoids travesties like that one (and the resulting liability) by refusing to keep people in jail at the mere request of ICE. Under the policy the city, quite properly, will hold someone for pickup by ICE only if the feds have gotten a warrant for their deportation or arrest.

Instead of engaging in baseless fear-mongering, Bykofsky should be praising the city administration for standing up for everyone’s equal civil rights. A country where any low-level government official can tell the police to jail you for days on mere suspicion, or for “investigation,” is not the country described in the Constitution of the United States.

Peter Goldberger
President
ACLU of Greater Philadelphia

Reggie Shuford
Executive Director
ACLU of Pennsylvania

Read the original article, including a letter from Everett Gillison, Chief of Staff/Deputy Mayor of Philadelphia, at Philly.com

Where can a person get a defense lawyer on contingency to help me defend myself against a person who is suing me for posting a bad review on a free website? I haven’t the money to get someone to represent me and I am in another State and have health issues and cannot get to that State to defend myself…Please help and advise me as to what to do….

P.S. Please notify me by e-mail of any help that I can get…I cannot find anyone that will represent me without paying out of pocket for this……This should be a civil case, but it isn’t! My Freedom of Speech has been violated!